To this day, Admiral Lord Nelson remains one of
Britain’s most heroic figures, military or otherwise.
His leadership ability along with his firm grasp of
naval strategy and tactics combined to make him a
formidable force in the Royal Navy. The Napoleonic Wars
provided Nelson with a stage on which to prove his
heroism, as wars are ought to do. At the Battle of
Trafalgar, a sniper’s bullet snatched his life at the
moment of victory. Lord Nelson’s death at Trafalgar
became the catalyst that ultimately made him the British
hero that he is today. What follows are excerpts from
contemporary...

One of the worst maritime disasters in British history
happened off the Isles of Scilly on this day in history,
22 October 1707. (O.S.) In the summer or 1707,
Commander-in-Chief of the British Fleets, Sir Cloudesley
Shovell, had led a fleet of 21 British ships in their
Mediterranean campaign against the French as part of the
War of the Spanish Succession. At summers end, the
fleet, led by Shovell’s flagship HMS Association,
departed Gibraltar on 29 September, bound for England.
The entire return voyage was plagued by bad weather and
strong gales. The portion of their journey that
traversed the Atlantic...